The Tease of Things I Don't Need

"I want to play a game."

That seemed the most appropriate catch phrase for this Saturday.

Operating on precious little sleep, I went to and participated in the Supernova pre-release at the Comics & More in the Plymouth Meeting Mall.

Groggy, but spirited, a good time appears to have been had by all.

Aaron (Azs of HC Realms and Wizkids' boards) in particular is to be commended for all he went through to make it a fun experience and to pack the event with prizes, including bringing many of his own to supplement things.

Wizkids' limitations saw this hoppin' venue only get a single case of Supernova, so the event ended up capped at 24 people, and we all got to buy two boosters of the new set and one of our choice of an earlier Marvel set. The price was the standard retail -- $7.99 es + tax -- so the buy-in was $25.41.

I opted for Armor Wars for my third booster -- why I can't say exactly. Sinister probably would have made more sense, as it would have given me a shot at some more Hydra and SHIELD pieces, but I did what I did. The AW booster contained a vet Magma, vet Paladin, exp Psylocke, exp. Capt. America and an Isolation Battlefield condition.

The two Supernova boosters contained (this is pooled, not meant to show groupings within a booster): Experienced Justice, exp and vet She-Hulk, vet Sage, exp Super-Ape Mikhlo (the super-strong gorilla), rookie Hyperion, rookie Skrull Infiltrator and a unique Binary. The cards I pulled were a Squadron Supreme Feat and a Loyalty Battlefield Condition. I pulled no one with the Defenders TA so the Squadron Supreme card was meaningless.

Seeing that various people had pulled Thanos, Super Skrull, various levels of Kang and Silver Surfer, Legacy/Captain Marvel and his dad, etc., I decided I needed power and the ability to cope with attacks. We were playing on the Space Map, too, so ranged attacks traversing any of the open space terrain were cut in half, so straight range didn't count for much. Also, since it's very much an outdoor map, Barrier didn't strike me as an especially useful power.

Ultimately, I decided to run with a three-clix team: rookie Hyperion (tough, mobile damage-dealer), exp. Captain America (Charging damage-dealer with an opening click of 17 Defense and Impervious) and the rookie Skrull Infiltrator. I decided to play the Loyalty BFC, too. This meant that any team I was playing against that had a wild card had to decide on a TA to copy at the start of the game and stick with it.

If I spend time going over my pull I'm sure I'll find that I should have gone with a different configuration - the veteran Sage, for instance, but the character means nothing to me - but time was limited and I did what I did.

With that I went into a four-match tournament.

The sculpts are mostly beautiful, and where they're not it's almost entirely due to the source artwork. The super-apes -- even the gorilla -- are all so tiny they're strangely cute. Justice looks bizarre as they've not only given him a somewhat extended knee peg to fit into the base, but they didn't make that part clear so the legs look terribly deformed at the knee.

This won me two games and lost me two games, one of each was a rout and one of each was a case where casualties were on both sides, but one or the other of us pulled out the win.

The most devastating piece I faced was the veteran Silver Surfer. Cap and Hyperion managed to hammer on him early on, which only ended up putting him on a click with Psychic Blast, an 11 Attack Value and solid Damage-reducers, which saw him whittle me down over the course of that match, in part because I made some bonehead moves with Hyperion, but mostly because it was a tough one to go against. In a later match I went up against a rookie Surfer and that was tough, too, but we took that game.

If I had to pick my MVP it was the 25 pt rookie Skrull Infiltrator. The piece is a wonder. Stealth, Skrull TA and Shape Change with a 16 Defense, 8 AV and 2 Damage up front is handy enough to make him a wonderful potential blocking and tie-up piece, but one should be encouraged to push him as one sets him next to one or two targets one wants to tie down, because on his second click, while his Damage drops to 1 he picks up Blades/Claws/Fangs and Combat Reflexes as his Defense drops one to 15.

See, by that second click, whenever an opponent wants to hit him, I roll one die first for Skrull TA. If I get a 6, the attacker suddenly things this is a friend and had to do something else instead. If I don't make that one, I roll a second time for Shape Change; if I roll a 5 or a 6 it's the same deal as with the Skrull TA. If I don't make that roll, someone trying to attack him in close combat is rolling against a 17.

Green, shape-shifting gold.

He nullified various characters for several turns on end and even helped chew several of them down, including some KOs. If he had a little range he'd be damn near perfect. I truly love Seth's approach to REVs of generics. If the remaining generics are as good as the ones I played with and against, building forces with them will be fun.

One complete surprise (at least for me) in the mix was finding out that apparently at the rate of one, random inclusion per case (additional info suggests they might even rarer than that), is a zombie superhero. See, there was a 5-issue mini-series called Marvel Zombies (which Protoclown recapped and had some fun with) where the Marvel universe had a zombie plague sweep the globe. From that series they decided to create zombie versions of Spider-man, Captain America, Wolverine and Hulk.


A zombie Hulk was what emerged from the case at our pre-release. Like next year's Hellboy action set each of these zombies comes with a standard Heroclix dial, but also with a Horrorclix monster card, so it's directly compatible for both games.

So, when opening a brick or even a booster, watch for any signs of decay.

(Addition: Here are pics of the Hulk & Spider-man zombie pieces someone shot my way. The Captain America and Wolverine ones are almost certainly out there somewhere, too.)


Aaron and the venue itself kicked in more prize materials on top of the 16 purple-ringed uniques they had for distribution, so along with multiple levels of tourney winners and Fellowship, purple-ringed uniques pieces were distributed for various, off-the-cuff events during the matches. "The next one to take Damage from a critical hit --" or "The next one to have someone one his team at or above 60 points KOed gets a purple-ringed LE" -- that sort of thing. As it turned out such a critical hit damage saw me being the first one to get one of the purple-ringed pieces. As it turned out it was Power Princess -- probably the one unique I wanted the least out of this set -- but gift horses and mouths and all that.

After all was said and done, I received some votes for fellowship and won a roll-off for it, so for that I was given both a Jack of Hearts purple ring version from this set and a Gennady Gavrilov LE (the LE for Crimson Dynamo) from Armor Wars. Also, I finally got a copy of the prison map created for Sinister. They needed to hold onto most of the Space maps for now - the few extras they had went to people who hadn't won anything - but they'll have more for the Supernova Marquee, which will happen very shortly after the set releases.

Once the matches were done I ended up doing some trades with one of the people I'd played against. He wanted to get the rookie Hyperion for himself and the experienced She-Hulk (with the Fantastic Four) TA for a friend who couldn't make it. I knew I'd get each of those at least once in my case, so I traded the rookie Hyperion for a vet Kree Colonel and a rookie Badoon Warrior. For the She-Hulk he gave me a vet Starhawk and three pieces from Mutant Mayhem he'd pulled but had no reason to want to take back with him (rookies Bishop and Hulk and an experienced Polaris -- pieces I already have but very possibly pieces someone else down the line will want, even if just because they like the characters and want them as little statues.)

After all that and some post-game sidelights, Nick and I ended out for a while. By this time I needed a meal, so we ate at Bertuccis and then went to see Saw III. If one liked the first two then once all the info's in you'll most likely see this as a fitting addition to the franchise. As with the second one there were a couple points where I thought for sure they'd lost it, and were just doing things in order to be outrageous even if it didn't make sense or, worse, was repetitive, but then matters would shuffle into order and it fit again. The weakness at this point is that the franchise is becoming increasingly self-referential; it folds and folds again on itself. They've managed to crank one out roughly in time for Halloween three years in a row, and I guess there'll be a Saw 4. During the drive home Nick and I were running through the most likely ways that'll be handled.

So, once it got rolling it was a fairly good day.

Tags: Heroclix, Saw III, Supernova Pre-release